Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  Do you know, dear fellow citizens, what destruction threatens us and in what peril we stand? … A stream that is barred in its course becomes more powerful. Once it has burst the dam, nothing can stem its flood. Such are our brothers whom we keep enchained. They are waiting for a favorable chance and time. The alarm bell rings. And the destructive force of bestiality breaks loose with terrifying speed.… Death and fiery desolation will be the answer to our harshness and inhumanity. The more procrastinating and stubborn we have been about the loosening of their fetters, the more violent they will be in their vengefulness. Bring back to your memory the events of former times [Pugachev].… They spared neither sex nor age. They sought more the joy of vengeance than the benefit of broken shackles. This is what awaits us. This is what we must expect.

  As a palliative to this grim prospect, Radishchev offered a plan for the gradual emancipation of serfs. All domestic serfs were to be emancipated at once; agricultural serfs would be granted full ownership of private plots and then be allowed to use their profits to buy their own freedom. They would be allowed to marry without asking their masters’ permission. And they would be judged in courts of their peers—that is, by other peasants.

  Catherine read the book in June 1790 and filled the margins with notes. She gave Radishchev intellectual credit: “[The author] has learning enough, and has read many books … he has imagination enough, and he is audacious in his writing.” She guessed that he acquired his education in Leipzig, “hence the suspicion falls on M. Radishchev, the more so because he is said to have a printing press in his house.” Had the book been written thirty or even twenty years earlier, Catherine might have recognized some of her own views; now, from her new perspective, she declared that “the purpose of this book is clear on every page. Its author, infected and filled with the French madness, is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority and the authorities, to stir up in the people’s indignation against their superiors and against the government.” She rejected Radishchev’s portrayal of the behavior of landowners and the condition of serfs and was outraged by his warnings of serf rage and impending revenge. The author, she declared, is “a rabble-rouser, worse than Pugachev … inciting the serfs to bloody rebellion.” And he was inciting not only the peasants but the general population to disregard the authority of all rulers, from empresses down to local officials. In Radishchev’s denunciations of her government and his mingling of the Pugachev horrors with the new “poisons” being concocted in France, she saw an effort to propagate the beliefs of the revolutionaries in Paris and destabilize Russia at a time when the country was fighting two wars. The book, she wrote in a margin, “could not be tolerated.”

  Radishchev was identified, arrested, and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress for interrogation. He was not tortured. Even so, aware of the consequences for his family, he began to renege. He declared that his book had stemmed from vanity; he said he had wanted to win literary fame. He did his best to minimize retribution by admitting that his language had been exaggerated and that his accusations against government officials were inaccurate. He denied any intention of attacking Catherine’s government; he meant only to point out certain correctable shortcomings. He had not intended to rouse peasant against landowner; he had only wished to force bad landowners to be ashamed of their behavior. He admitted that he hoped for the freedom of the serfs but declared that he wanted to achieve this through legislative action, such as that already taken or proposed by the Empress Catherine. He threw himself on Catherine’s mercy. He was tried by the Central Criminal Court in St. Petersburg, charged with sedition and lese-majesté, and sentenced to death by beheading. The Senate routinely confirmed the verdict. In the interim, however, Catherine had forwarded the book to Potemkin for comment. Despite the personal attacks on himself as well as the empress, the prince advocated leniency. “I’ve read the book you sent me. I am not angry,” he wrote to Catherine. “It seems, Matushka, he has been slandering you, too. And you also won’t be angry. Your deeds are your shield.” Potemkin’s moderate response calmed Catherine, who did what she always did: she commuted the death penalty and changed it to a sentence of ten years of Siberian exile.

  Thereafter, Radishchev was treated with relative leniency. After sentencing, he was taken from the court in chains, but the following morning the chains were struck off by Catherine’s order. He was allowed sixteen months to reach his place of exile four thousand miles east of St. Petersburg. Minister of Commerce Alexander Vorontsov, his patron and friend, sent him clothes, books, and a thousand rubles a year. Eventually, Radishchev, by now a widower, was joined in Siberia by his two youngest children, brought to him by his sister-in-law, who remained with him and bore him three more children. He constructed a large house for his family, his servants, and his books. He worked as an amateur doctor, taught his children, and read the books sent to him by his friends. Soon after Catherine’s death in 1796, her son, Paul, terminated Radishchev’s exile and allowed him to return to his estate near Moscow. In 1802, deeply depressed, he committed suicide, leaving behind the dying words of Cato: “Now I am my own master.” His Journey was published in London in 1859. Three years later—sixty years after Radishchev’s death—Catherine’s great-grandson, Emperor Alexander II, abolished serfdom.

  When partitioning Poland in 1772, Russia, Austria, and Prussia had imposed on that nation a constitution that limited the authority of the king and the Diet and left power in the hands of an independent, conservative aristocracy that refused to govern or be governed, leaving the country in a perpetual state of near-anarchy. Stanislaus Augustus, the king installed by Catherine, reigned for the next sixteen years, but in all important matters, Poland’s government was overseen by St. Petersburg. Territorially, Poland remained large, and through these years the resentment of many Poles against the partitioning powers, particularly Russia, continued to fester. In September 1788, with both Catherine and her ally Joseph II of Austria involved in war with Turkey, Poles saw their chance to make a change. A Polish Diet, hostile to Polish dependence on Russia, met and was almost immediately confederated. The liberum veto was set aside, enabling the Diet to make decisions by majority vote. Amid an eruption of anti-Russian feeling and much verbal abuse of Catherine, Stanislaus warned of the danger of making unilateral changes in a constitution approved by the empress. He was ignored. During the following months, the confederated Diet proceeded to overturn the governmental structure endorsed by Russia for sixteen years. With her army in the south, Catherine could do nothing—for the moment, at least—but pretend not to notice.

  The following year, 1790, Catherine suffered a series of political setbacks. In March, King Frederick William of Prussia, who in 1886 had succeeded his uncle Frederick the Great, surprised Russia and Austria by signing a defensive treaty with Poland, pledging military assistance against foreign interference. On May 3, 1791, the emboldened Polish confederated Diet, knowing that Russia was still enmeshed in war on the Black Sea, and also believing that Poland was now protected by its treaty with Prussia, voted to adopt a new constitution, providing for a hereditary, rather than elective, monarchy. The present ruler, Stanislaus, would be allowed to remain during his lifetime, but on his death, the crown was to become hereditary, passing from father to son in the house of the electors of Saxony. The liberum veto was to be abolished and replaced in the Diet by majority rule. The purpose of the new constitution was to weaken the old nobility and provide Poland with a more effective national government.

  Catherine, realizing the extent to which the new constitution diminished the power of the old Polish nobility, on whom she relied to keep Poland weak, was alarmed. The Russian-Polish treaty of 1772 had been unilaterally scrapped. She had no troops available to uphold the old constitution, but, in her anger and frustration, she quickly found allies among the Poles themselves. The conservative Polish nobility, knowing that a weak central government was necessary if they were to keep power in their hands, also rejected the May 3 constitution.
These noblemen, meeting in Grodno, formed their own new federation, proclaimed the restoration of the 1772 constitution, and sent a delegation to St. Petersburg to ask Catherine to help them.

  Catherine was eager to help. The May 3 constitution was far from radical, but to Catherine there seemed a disturbing similarity between it and the developing attack on the monarchy in France. By July 1791, peace with Turkey was near, and the Russian army would soon be available to support the conservative Poles. She had already told Potemkin, during his last visit to St. Petersburg, that she intended to appoint him commander in chief in this new campaign. There were risks to be considered. Both Leopold of Austria and Frederick William of Prussia, concerned about the deteriorating situation in France, and hoping to calm the increasing turmoil behind their backs in eastern Europe, had agreed to accept Poland’s new May 3 constitution. Frederick William did so as Poland’s new ally; Leopold because he wished to be free to concentrate on France. Both monarchs urged Catherine to join them.

  Catherine, who had already decided to act alone if necessary, refused. She tried instead to persuade the Prussians and Austrians to support her approach. She bluntly told her own College of Foreign Affairs in December 1791 that she would never agree to the new Polish political structure, and that she was determined to act. Prussia and Austria “will oppose us with only a pile of written paper,” she predicted. She anticipated protest, but Austria, facing war with France, would do nothing, and if Prussia’s agreement to ignore its treaty with Poland had to be bought with additional Polish territory, she would agree to another partition. As for the Poles themselves, she understood that to restore the 1772 constitution, an invasion by the Russian army would be necessary.

  Behind Catherine’s militant new Polish policy was the fact that, despite her talk of a crusade against France, her real worries lay closer to home. She was angered by the steps the Poles had already taken and alarmed by what might follow. An effective, potentially revolutionary regime in Poland would be dangerous to Russia. Was she to ignore this possible threat in order to fight Jacobinism in France? Her duty was to deal with the enemy in the place most threatening to her. She was determined, she told Grimm, to “exterminate that nest of Jacobins in Warsaw.” This was the façade of her argument, but she revealed her real strategy in an outburst to her private secretary on November 14, 1791: “I am breaking my head to push the courts of Vienna and Berlin to involve themselves in the affairs of France. The Austrian court is willing but the court of Berlin refuses to move.… There are reasons which I cannot explain [to them]. I wish to engage them in these affairs in order to have elbow room. I have in mind much unfinished business and it is necessary that they be kept busy so that they cannot hinder me.” Her “unfinished business” was to restore Russian control of Poland.

  On April 9, 1792, France unintentionally assisted Catherine by declaring war on Austria. The empress could now be certain that Austria would not honor its promises to Poland to support the May 3 Polish constitution. At the end of April, she informed Berlin and Vienna of her intention to invade Poland; on May 7, sixty-five thousand Russian troops crossed the Polish border, followed by another thirty-five thousand a few weeks later. Poland immediately appealed to Frederick William of Prussia on the basis of the 1790 defensive treaty. The king of Prussia behaved as Catherine had foreseen. Anticipating war with France, he betrayed his treaty obligation to assist Poland, declaring that he had not been consulted about the May 3 constitution and that this absolved him of treaty commitments. He was not, he declared, “obliged to defend a constitution drawn up without his knowledge.” Stanislaus, again playing both sides, first swore to fight for the May 3 constitution and then attempted to negotiate with Catherine by offering to give up the throne to her grandson Constantine. She was not interested. Having nothing further to offer, the Polish king ordered the Polish army to lay down its arms.

  The military occupation proceeded smoothly, but Russia soon found itself caught in a thicket of political difficulties. The conservative Polish leaders Catherine was supporting fell to squabbling among themselves and proved unable to govern. By December 1792, Catherine had decided that the only solution to growing chaos was to formalize the occupation in a second partition. Frederick William was offered the areas in the north and west that Prussia had long desired. He accepted. Both Russia and Prussia declared that their actions were aimed at fighting Jacobinism in Poland. Frederick William announced that he was forced to send his army to protect Prussia from the raging Jacobinism across his border. Catherine continued to use this argument. “Apparently you ignore that the Jacobiniere of Warsaw were in correspondence with the Jacobin Club in Paris,” she wrote to Grimm. In January 1793, Russia and Prussia secretly signed a treaty that sealed the Second Partition of Poland.

  Unaware of this treaty, Poland’s conservative leaders asked Catherine for assurance that she would protect the physical integrity of their country. It was too late; early in April 1793, Russian and Prussian manifestos announcing the new partition were published. Attempting to give their actions a cloak of legality, Catherine and Frederick William forced Stanislaus to leave Warsaw for Grodno, the center of the failing conservative confederation, and there to preside over a Diet that was to come to “an amiable understanding with the partitioning powers.” To help the Diet make this decision, the Russian ambassador announced that “soldiers of Her Imperial Majesty would occupy the lands of any deputy who opposed the will of the nation.” In July, members of the Diet sullenly gave consent to the new partition treaty with Russia, but, hating Prussia more, they refused to ratify the cession of territory to a nation that had betrayed them. The Diet building in Grodno was surrounded by Russian troops, and the deputies were told that no one would be allowed to leave until the partition treaty was approved. The session continued into the night. At first, the deputies shouted and refused to sit; then they lapsed into total silence and sat immobile in their seats. At 4 in the morning, the marshal of the Diet asked three times: “Does the Diet authorize the delegates to sign the treaty?” No deputy replied. Whereupon, the marshal announced: “Silence means consent.” In this manner, the partition treaty was approved by the Polish Diet.

  In effect, the treaty with Russia turned newly truncated Poland into a protectorate—or, as one Polish deputy said bitterly, “a Russian province.” All domestic and foreign policies were to be submitted for Russian approval; the personnel of the government would be approved by St. Petersburg; the Polish army would be reduced to fifteen thousand men. Stanislaus kept his throne. Politically impotent, superfluous, and pathetic, he returned to his palace in Warsaw, despised by his subjects.

  Russia’s new share of Poland was large: eighty-nine thousand square miles of eastern Poland, including the rest of Belorussia, with the city of Minsk; further extensive slices of Lithuania, including Vilnius; and the remaining Polish Ukraine. In all, three million people were added to Catherine’s empire. Prussia took twenty-three thousand square miles, finally acquiring the long-coveted regions of Danzig and Thorn, as well as other territory in western Poland; Prussia’s gain was one million inhabitants. Austria had no share in the spoils this time, but Francis II was promised that Prussia would remain an active ally in Austria’s war against France. Poland now was reduced to one-third its original size and a population of four million. When the treaties were signed, Catherine told herself that not only had she fended off the revolutionary virus spreading from France, but she was simply reoccupying lands that had once belonged to the great sixteenth-century principality of Kiev, “lands still inhabited by people of the Russian faith and race.”

  By the spring of 1794, when Robespierre was supreme in France, many Poles had concluded that the further mutilation of their country and the humiliating constitutional settlement imposed were intolerable. In March, when the disarming of the Polish army was attempted, the nation rose up. Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish officer trained in France who had fought beside Washington and Lafayette in the American War of Independence, sud
denly appeared in Kraców and took command of Polish rebel forces. On March 24, with four thousand soldiers and two thousand peasants armed with scythes, he defeated seven thousand Russian soldiers near Kraców. The revolt spread, moving so quickly that when it reached Warsaw, the Russian occupation garrison of seven thousand men was caught by surprise. Three thousand Russian soldiers were killed or taken prisoner; the bodies of the dead were stripped and thrown naked into the streets. Frederick William of Prussia was denounced as a betrayer, and a portrait of Catherine, taken from the Russian embassy, was publicly torn to pieces.

  When reports of these events reached St. Petersburg, Catherine told Prussia and Austria that the time had come “to extinguish the last spark of the Jacobin fire in Poland.” Frederick William, smarting from the personal insults hurled at him by the Poles, asked for the honor of personally strangling Polish resistance. Catherine suggested that he take charge of putting down the revolt in Poland west of the Vistula River, and then advised Francis II of Austria to move into the south. Both hurried to oblige, and both expected to be paid for their efforts; thus, still another partition of Poland became an expectation of all parties. Frederick William divided the army he had deployed against France and sent twenty-five thousand men to the east against Poland. By mid-July, these twenty-five thousand Prussians and fourteen thousand Russians were advancing on Warsaw from two directions. Late in July, Frederick William himself arrived before Warsaw to direct a siege of the city. The Prussians made little progress, and in September, the king, declaring that he needed his troops to face threats from France, lifted his siege and withdrew.